


doublethink

by Rei_Rei (anti60ne)



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Mindfuck, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 09:14:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anti60ne/pseuds/Rei_Rei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>when gravity and antigravity coexist in timeless parallels, kris is spared the need to choose between luhan and chanyeol.</p>
            </blockquote>





	doublethink

  
At exactly 8:00 AM, Kris holds his gaze at the iris sensor and counts to three. He waits for the sensor to beep, signaling that his identity has been verified and arrival time recorded.  
  
The screen flashes  _8:00 AM March 15, 2112._  
  
The office is empty.  
  
Kris pushes open the glass doors and ambles in soundlessly, the noise from the padding of his leather shoes absorbed by the carpet. He feels a chilly draft breeze past the cubicles. Someone had left a window open.  
  
Deja vu, he thinks. He’s positive he’s been in this exact situation before. Kris frowns slightly as he follows the draft to the open window.  
  
Yes. This has definitely happened before.  
  
The window is wide open, allowing unhindered entry of early-spring wind. He places one hand on the frame and is about to slide it close when he feels an unknown urge to stick his head out. So that’s what he does. He perches both hands on the windowsill as he extends himself out the window. He looks down first, 12 floors below, on the bustling traffic of miniature-sized cars and pedestrians, rushing on their way to work and other engagements. As he raises his head, he catches something out of the corner of his eye. He turns to his right.  
  
There is a yellow sticky note plastered on the pipe hung vertically next to the window.  
  
He frowns. Deja vu, again.  
  
Something tells him to ignore it and just pull back inside and close the window. He has better things to do than playing Sherlock Holmes; he still has work that he didn’t get to finish the night before, nagging impatiently in the back of his head. But it’s as if the sticky note possesses some sort of power, hypnotizing him and drawing him closer, seducing him with a whisper,  _C’mon, you know you want to find out..._  
  
The nagging of his leftover work fades into nothingness as the urge to retrieve the sticky note becomes overpowering.  
  
Kris reaches out and pulls the piece of paper by the edge.  
  
It doesn’t bulge, as if it’s been super-glued. Kris furrows his brows at the unusual stubbornness of a regular sticky note. He pulls again. Still nothing.  
  
After a few tries, Kris becomes simultaneously stumped and amazed at how adhesive the note is, as if the sticky end has actually coalesced with the metal cylinder. Out of frustration infused with curiosity, Kris hauls himself up and sits on the windowsill, hanging his upper body outward as his left arm grips the window frame, his right arm outstretched in a continued wrestle with the sticky note.  
  
He bites on his lower lip as he gives the hardest tug he could manage in this awkward position, and Kris’s buttocks slip off the windowsill, almost gracefully.  
  
  
  
  
Panting in panic, Kris finds his body dangling in midair, his right hand clutching onto the pipe, the sticky note peeking out from underneath his palm. He gulps as he watches his own hand slither downward due to the friction between his sweaty palm and the paper.  
  


 

 

 

 

⇣

⇣⇣⇣

 

⇣⇣⇣

⇣⇣⇣  
⇣⇣⇣⇣  
↓↓↓↓  
⇊⇊⇊

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He falls before he could even scream, his eyes widening in a blank horror at the clear March sky zooming out of his sight. The gravitational force drags him down with no reservations or restraints. In the five seconds of his free-fall, a wave of thoughts floods his mind and things from the past and the future flash across his eyes. Another feeling of deja vu grips him, hard, and he suspects if this is all just a dream.  
  
  
  
  
When his back smashes into a solid form, it’s not asphalt. Instead, it’s something soft. So soft that Kris, for a microsecond, thinks he must be in heaven, lying on the feathery clouds of paradise.  
  
“I was wondering when you were going to wake up just now.”  
  
The chirpy voice is familiar. Kris cracks open his eyes.  
  
“Are you going to get up or what?” Luhan feigns irked impatience as he pushes himself off the bed, arms crossed before his chest.  
  
Instead of being startled or baffled, Kris’s lips involuntarily upturn into a smile, which grows wider as his consciousness fills him in on the owner of this angelic face.  
  
  
  
“Nice to see you again,” Kris says without realizing. His synapses are firing at an alarming speed, remote fragments of the preconscious snapping into place.  
  
“Huh?” Luhan frowns at the bizarre remark. Or so he thinks.  
  
“Nothing.” Kris flashes him a reassuring smile as he turns to his side and sits up. His eyes accidentally land on a newspaper lying in the crinkles of the sheets. Luhan has a habit of reading in bed.  
  
The dates inked across the upper right corner of the newspaper indicate _March 15, 2012_.  
  
  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

☯-☯-☯

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s strange because Kris  _knows_  this has happened before, yet every time he falls into the gravity of Luhan, it feels like it’s happening for the first time.  
  
But at the same time, it feels like it’s happening for the  _n_ th time.  
  
Kris, if he really thinks about it, is slightly afraid of Luhan. When they are together, the air becomes suffocating, the space grows confining, and Kris is left with barely a heartbeat struggling inside his chest, a weak reminder that he is, indeed, still alive.  
  
But his aliveness warrants doubts because in Luhan’s gravity, everything feels so addictively heavy that Kris strains to keep his balance, tottering between his usual assertiveness and Luhan-induced deference.  
  
His ears buzz and his eyes flutter when his face is framed by warm hands with a narcotic scent. When Luhan’s scorching lips touch his eyelid, Kris descends into the molten core of the earth, a world where only he and Luhan exist, his will to rise dissipating with each brush of Luhan’s fingertips, tapping anesthetic commands into his bones.  
  
In another world, where Luhan's gravity doesn't exist, Kris stands tall, both literally and figuratively. His physical stature of nearly six-foot-two poses a natural towering presence over others, and, either as a cause or an effect, he dominates a room the instant he walks in. People feel compelled to listen to what he has to say, and caves without even knowing to Kris's requests and wishes. He does not abuse this influence of his, but he does leverage it  in the workplace, and he finds himself power-tripping sometimes, because, who wouldn't?  
  
At first, or what he thinks is the inception, Kris was uncomfortable with the essence of Luhan and how much it weighed on him, pressing him close to the ground and keeping him down. Kris struggled to rise, but gravitation is an indiscriminant dictator, and he could not fight the tyranny of Luhan's gravity  
  
He gave up, much more quickly than he should have, letting himself be adsorbed to the bottom, the mindnumbing toxin seeping through his consciousness, dissolving all rights to his own thoughts and feelings.  
  
In Luhan’s gravity, Kris doesn’t know how to say no, the two-letter word erased from the wordbank inside his head without a trace.

 

 

It always ends in the same way, with Kris hovering above Luhan, panting, his eyes sucked into the black hole in Luhan’s half-lidded eyes and his ears filled with breathy moans. Kris would forget for a moment that he is only on top because Luhan doesn’t like to do all the work, and he would remember with a sharp pain, as if burning his fingertip on the stove, that Luhan is the one pulling, that he isn’t the one pushing.  
  
When he comes, Kris would shut his eyes and fall onto Luhan, but it isn’t Luhan that’s underneath him. He would then open his eyes in maladjusted senses, and find himself on the carpeted floor of his office.  
  
The open window would be closed.  
  
Still supine, Kris raises his hand above his face. His wristwatch reads  _8:05 AM, March 15, 2112_.  
  
He takes a deep breath, his eyelids fluttering rapidly as if his consciousness is stuck in a recurring dream. He’s back to the world void of Luhan and his gravity. When Kris gets on his feet, he feels slightly disoriented, unused to the gravity measured at 9.8 m/s2, his own weight foreign to him, almost a little too light.  
  
Kris tosses away his thoughts when the glass doors squeak, signaling the arrival of his colleagues. Then he returns to his desk, his dress shirt still wet from his sweat mixed with Luhan’s scent.  
  


 

 

☯-☯-☯

  
  
  
  
  
  
At exactly 8:00 AM, Kris holds his gaze at the iris sensor and counts to three. He waits for the sensor to beep, signaling that his identity has been verified and arrival time recorded.  
  
The screen flashes  _8:00 AM October 15, 2112._  
  
The office is empty.  
  
Kris pushes open the glass doors and ambles in soundlessly, the noise from the padding of his leather shoes absorbed by the carpet. He feels a chilly draft breeze past the cubicles. Someone had left a window open.  
  
Deja vu, he thinks. He’s positive he’s been in this exact situation before. Kris frowns slightly as he follows the draft to the open window.  
  
It’s the same routine again, the same jamais vu that slips in and out of Kris’s consciousness as he, as per usual, sticks out his head, sees the yellow sticky note to his right, caves into his curiosity driven by some unknown power, and struggles to retrieve the note. Then he would, once again, find himself hanging off the pipe.  
  
When his grasp gives and his entire body drops into midair, Kris feels a force sucking him upward, instead of downward. The feeling of jamais vu clutches Kris as he soars through the atmosphere, the chilly autumn wind scraping against his cheeks, forcing him to shut his eyes.  
  
  
  


⇈⇈⇈  
↑↑↑↑  
⇡⇡⇡  
⇡⇡⇡

⇡⇡⇡

 

⇡⇡⇡

⇡

  
  
  
  
His ascent always feels limitless, and he wonders, with eyes closed in fear of the truth, if he will simply travel out of the galaxy and spontaneously combust in outer space. But at some point, Kris stops rising, and he feels the same softness underneath his back. When he opens his eyes, he’s not surprised to find Chanyeol curled up in his arms, sleeping soundly. It takes a few nanoseconds for Kris’s preconscious to modulate, but by the time it registers in his mind, Chanyeol is no longer an unseen face, and Kris breaks into a familiar grin of contentment.  
  
It’s the same white bed, the same ceiling, the same room. But there is Chanyeol, who has left his scent in the sheets, his larger frame claiming more space of the bed. Kris watches Chanyeol sleep, though somehow he knows that he’s supposed to wake him; there is a white rabbit constantly, though softly, nagging him about the time. The time, he muses, and his eyes begin to search for the same newspaper lying somewhere between the unmade sheets, before his consciousness teases him that it’s the 23rd century and papers no longer exist. And so Kris looks around the room, and yes, of course, the digital slab of glass hung on the wall that serves as the controller of the house. The numbers read  _October 15, 2212_.  
  
  


 

 

☯-☯-☯

  
  
  
  
  
  
Kris revels in the antigravity of Chanyeol. It’s more unknown than gravity, but somehow makes him feel safer. Chanyeol listens to Kris, he has quickly come to realize, and Kris finds comfort in the fact that he can be more of himself. He still owns his thoughts and emotions, like in the Chanyeol-less world, the only difference being that they would become so dominant that they subdue Chanyeol’s.  
  
Chanyeol, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to mind. He submits to Kris in words and actions because he holds Kris’s thoughts above his own. Kris thrives on reigning over Chanyeol, in having Chanyeol fetch him coffee, make him breakfast in bed, give him a foot massage, and in watching Chanyeol squirm and writhe below him, whimpering and pleading for Kris to stop, but no, don’t stop, go faster.  
  
The power is addicting and another toxin in itself. The notion of supremacy makes Kris feel like he is stepping over gravity, towering and encompassing the entirety of Chanyeol. The lightness of his being when he’s within the antigravity of Chanyeol lifts the heaviness of his mind, and Kris thinks he wouldn’t mind being weightless for self-defined eternity.  
  
It always ends in the same way, with Kris pressing himself down on Chanyeol, sending merciless thrusts that reduce Chanyeol into incoherence, his clouded eyes capturing Kris’s soul through an interlocked gaze before effortlessly launching it into somewhere galaxies away.  
  
When he comes, Kris would shut his eyes and fall onto Chanyeol, but it isn’t Chanyeol that’s underneath him. He would then open his eyes in maladjusted senses, and find himself on the carpeted floor of his office.  
  
The open window would be closed.  
  
Still supine, Kris raises his hand above his face. His wristwatch reads  _8:05 AM, October 15, 2112_.  
  
Kris’s eyelids flitter as images get bounced back and forth between his synapses, his preconscious restoring itself to equilibrium. When he stands, it takes a few seconds for his physical body to adjust to the gravity of a world without Chanyeol and his antigravity, and his weight feels marginally heavier.  
  
When the glass doors creak and scattered footsteps travel inside, Kris walks gingerly, unaccustomed to his own feet, toward his desk. He settles into his swivel chair and exhales, a sensation that doesn’t belong to this world lingering on his palm. As Kris slowly encloses his hand into a fist, his fingertips dig into the remnant of kisses that Chanyeol had left.

 

**Author's Note:**

> written in July 2013, originally in two parts.


End file.
